


Curses Pt.1

by seeminglyincurablesentimentality (myinnerchildisbored)



Series: Rose Shelby vs. All the Bastards [18]
Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-08-23
Packaged: 2020-09-24 17:10:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20362087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myinnerchildisbored/pseuds/seeminglyincurablesentimentality
Summary: After Grace's death, Tommy and Rosie each have their own demons to wrestle.Set in S3, Rose is 9, Charlie is 2.





	Curses Pt.1

Rose dreamed there was a dancing bear trapped in her father’s office. Tumbling around, moaning, getting tangled up in its chain and knocking into things.

It needed someone to open the door.

“Hello, sweetheart.”

A fairyland queen, wearing a dress made of spun sugar and her aunt Polly’s face, slid in between Rose and the closed office door. Her face was very white, with little black lines running down from her eyes where the Polly mask was cracking. The bear fell over in the office, taking the desk’s lamp with it, hitting its nose on the arm of a chair and howling with pain.

It scared the queen, Rose could tell, her eyes were huge and black and she flinched at the sound. She didn’t know what to do next; but that was orright, because Rose knew. She tried to slip by the queen, the door was only a couple of steps away. The queen caught her by the sleeve of her nightie.

“Rosie…sweetheart, you can’t go in.”

The queen sounded just like Polly, too, it was quite remarkable. Maybe she was the real Polly and the real Polly was a queen in the dream. Maybe the lines weren’t cracks in mask but some kind of warpaint, like the red Indians wore. There was a bellow from the other side of the door and Rose could nearly see the bear throwing its head back and roaring.

“It’s orright,” Rose said calmly. “I’ll just open the door.”

The hand on her sleeve tightened and Rose felt herself being pulled away from the door, quite gently, but away from it nonetheless.

“That door’s staying shut, _ves’tacha_.”

Rose dug her heels in. The floor was freezing. That didn’t seem right. You weren’t meant to feel the cold or heat when you were dreaming, Rose seemed to remember.

“But the bear…”

“Pol, what-“ Finn was there now, all the way across the room, dressed in bits of his best suit, his eyebrows rising when he spotted Rose. “Ah...I-“

“She’s still half asleep,” Polly, Rose was pretty certain now that it was in fact actually Polly, interrupted. “Let’s get you back in bed, eh?”

“The bear but…” Rose tried again.

“Are you hungry?” Polly asked, her smile completely at odds with the look in her eyes.

“Yea,” Finn chimed in. “Come on, Ro, we’ll hunt for a feed downstairs.”

Rose planted her bare feet on the icy floor and looked from Finn to Pol to Finn and back again.

“Am I awake?” she asked.

“It doesn’t matter-“ Pol started, but Rose was already pinching herself – quite hard – in the arm Polly was still holding onto.

It hurt like a bastard.

“I’m awake,” Rose announced.

“You’re fuckin’ strange, is what you are,” Finn said.

“Rosie, sweetheart-“

“If I’m awake, then who’s in there?”

Polly’s smile was slipping all over the place now. Finn was rubbing the back of his neck, stuck where he was standing.

“What’s going on?” Rose asked.

Polly let go off her sleeve, but Rose wasn’t at all sure that she wanted to go near the door anymore.

“What-“

“You go on downstairs with Finn,” Pol said quietly. “I’ll be down in a-“

A bang from the office cut her off and three pairs of eyes flew to the door, staring at the handle like it was the barrel of a shotgun.

“Come on,” Finn said.

“What’s wrong with me dad?”

“Go with Finn, Rose. Now.”

Pol left no room for argument and Rose, albeit very reluctantly, followed Finn towards the catacombs leading to the kitchen. He took her hand and pulled her along, it made her feel all of four years old.

“Finn?”

“D’you know where they keep the drink down here?” he asked lightly.

“Yea. But, Finn-“

“Aren’t you freezing? With no shoes o-“

“Finn!”

Rose wrenched her hand from his and brought them both to a stop. The tiled walls were carrying the faintest echoes of the commotion miles above.

“Just fuckin’ come on,” Finn pleaded.

“Is he-“ Rose was shaking her head furiously, trying to get her thoughts in order. “Did someone…Is he orright?”

Finn leaned back against the wall and puffed out his cheeks, air escaping with a hiss like a kettle.

“Tommy’s orright, Rosie,” he said. “I mean…he’s not now, but he’ll be orright. He’s not hurt.”

“He sounds hurt.”

“He’s…” Finn was wrestling with his words now. “Listen, orright. Listen. It’s…ah, fuck. We’ll wait for Pol, yea?”

“No, you tell me,” Rose stared at him in the too bright light. “You tell me now.”

Finn stared up at the ceiling for a second.

“It’s Grace,” he said finally.

“What’s Grace?”

“There was…” Finn cleared his throat and started again. “At the party. There was a man with a gun at the party.”

All of Rose’s blood turned to jam. She could feel it trying to push through her body, getting stuck, slowing everything down.

“Did he hurt her?” she asked, even though the bear upstairs was answer enough.

“He killed her.”

The madness upstairs had stopped, or maybe someone had closed the door on the top of the stairs. Either way, they couldn’t hear Rose’s father anymore.

“Why?”

Finn shrugged.

“Did they catch him?”

“Yea,” Finn told his shoes. “Arthur, uhm, Arthur smashed his head in with a crystal fucking vase…”

Rose was sliding down now, until she sat on the tiles with her back against the wall, her whole body turning to mush. Heels were clipping down the stairs and towards them now. Polly’s long white gloves had blood on them, Rose hadn't noticed it before. There was some on Finn’s shirt as well, tiny splatters of red, like someone had thrown cherry pits at him.

Pol looked from Rose to Finn and back again, and threw up her hands.

“Christ sake, Finn,” she snapped.

“It’s not his fault,” Rose said weakly. “I made him.”

Polly sighed and extended a bloody glove to pull Rose up from the floor.

“He’ll be orright, Rosie,” she said. “He’s sad and he’s in pain, but it’ll pass. Come on. We’ll find the kettle. And some whiskey.”

Rose allowed herself to be led towards the kitchen, only vaguely aware of her legs moving beneath her. Pol put her on a chair and started opening cabinets.

“Ah, Ro, come on…” Finn was beside her now, his hand on her shoulder, squeezing it awkwardly.

“Let her cry, Finn,” Pol said softly from somewhere by the stove. “It’s the right time for tears. You cry, sweetheart, it’ll do you good. Washes the pain away.”

Rose sat and cried silently, watching Finn pour whiskey and Polly make tea through a curtain of tears. Perhaps Pol was right and tears really did wash pain away; but there wasn’t a river of tears strong enough to move the rocks of fear forming in the depth of Rose’s guts.

“It’ll be orright,” her aunt said again, sounding miles away.

It was true, probably. Her father had made it through plenty of death. The war and his mum and Rose’s mum…he wouldn’t be a sad dancing bear forever. He’d stop roaring. And then, when he found out that this was all Rose’s fault, he’d have her uncle Arthur crack her skull with a vase as well.   


#

You had to collect all the cobwebs from all over the house.

Rose had climbed up bookcases and crawled into the cabinets under the stairs, she’d spent an entire weekend harvesting sticky whiteness from any corner she could reach. It was important not to miss any of them, Ronja Lee had told her, otherwise it wouldn’t work. All in all, the procedure was pretty simple, getting the cobwebs was the hardest part.

Black cloths were in abundance in Frances’ drawers – she put them over her head when she went to church, so everyone would know she was serious about her prayers – and to get hold of a single dead fly, recently deceased, Rose had to look no further than the stables.

You put the cobwebs on the cloth and the fly on the cobwebs; and then you wrote down the spell on a sheet of paper.

_North, South, East, West_, Rose wrote slowly, in her best handwriting, _Spider’s web shall bind her best. East, West, North, South. Hold her limbs and stop her mouth. Seal her eyes and choke her breath. Wrap her round with ropes of death. _It gave her chills, even if she didn’t say the words out loud.

You had to fold the paper four times and then wrap it up with the webs and the fly inside the cloth, make a sort of bundle. You were meant to hang it in a dark corner for ages afterwards, until it was covered in a thick coat of dust; and then you had to take it somewhere far away and bury it in the ground. Of course, Rose couldn’t really hang it anyplace for any length of time, nowhere in her house was save from the prying feather dusters of the black-and-whites.

She hung the spell at the back of the closet, but then washing day came and Rose lost her nerve, worried one of the maids would find it when she put Rose’s dresses way. So, she took her barely dusty bundle and buried it in the field beyond the fence; admittedly, not extremely far away, but not very close either. Not really.

It was the best she could do, Rose figured. It might still work a bit. Enough to stop Grace’s mouth from getting Rose into Tommy’s bad books. Just hold her limbs to the point where they wouldn’t waltz off across the ocean and leave Rose with only Frances and the bastard for company.

If it worked at all.

#

Of course, her father and Grace had gone off to America anyway. They were away for weeks and weeks, and when they got back it seemed as if they simply couldn’t stop touching each other.

They’d come back and paid a man to take a picture of the four of them – Tommy, Grace, the bastard, and Rose – and another man to make the photo into a humungous painting. He’d changed Rose’s scowl into a smile, probably for extra money. It annoyed Rose every time she passed the painting, especially because her father had been allowed to keep his serious face. Smiling in pictures was for rubes.

And then, despite the cobwebs and the fly and the spell folded in four, they’d gotten married.

Somewhere in between them coming back and them getting married, the bundle in the ground had slipped Rose’s mind. Perhaps because she was certain it wouldn’t work, not now. Perhaps because Grace, even though she set Rose’s teeth on edge, was soothing something inside Tommy that was impervious to the power of drink and smoke and keeping busy.

So, she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten all about it, until it worked.

#

Without Grace in it, the big house turned into an endless cave. Rose had always known that Grace took up a lot of time, but she’d been unaware that Grace was the person filling up the house. She’d filled it with curtains and chatter and people coming round to talk about things Rose never properly understood. She’d filled it with pretty things and cups that weren’t for drinking and more toys than all the small boys of Birmingham had together. She’d filled it with music and bottled smells and books, as well. Lots of books.

There was one about knights, that had a picture in it of a castle cut in half. You could see how thick the walls were and how the iron gates were let down and the bridges drawn up for when the enemy was attacking. Rose sat in the furthest corner of the sofa, curled into a tight ball and watched her father turn into a castle from behind her knees. Pol and Ada were bloodying themselves trying to get to him. They couldn’t see the stonewall that enclosed Tommy or the wrought iron spikes or the barbed wire on top of it all; they just kept crashing into it and coming away a little paler and a bit more shaken. And then they’d try again.

There were people coming to take a dress for Grace to wear in her coffin. Other people were coming to talk bout flowers and words and invitations. It wasn’t altogether different from wedding preparations.

Her father drifted away from Ada and Pol, until he ended up by the drinks and glasses at the other end of the sofa. Even from inside his castle he could still open the bottle and pour the whiskey and tip some of it into himself through a thin slit in the walls. He was looking somewhere far away; his eyes had turned to spyglasses. They fell on Rose very much by accident.

“Orright?”

He was off his face, Rose realised, drunk with pain and drunker with the attempts to control it.

“Yea,” Rose whispered.

“Good girl, Rosie,” her father said dreamily. “You go out, eh? Go out and play.”

It was raining cats and fucking dogs outside. Rose unfolded herself, climbed off the sofa and went out anyway. She tilted her face into the rain, opened her mouth and pretended she was a pirate, drowning in the ocean.

#

If there’d been an apple in with her, Grace would have looked just like Snow White’s fair-haired sister, even if the coffin was made from wood.

Pol had put Rose into a black coat and onto the seat next to Tommy. It seemed odd that he should be sitting, he hadn’t sat in any place since the dark night of the dancing bear. Rose didn’t think he had. They were so close, their sleeves were nearly touching, but there were miles in between them. Mountains and valleys and oceans and space.

Rose looked across the great wasteland at her father and found him still as the stones of the church itself. His back was so straight no part of it touched the bench. Every bit of him was hard, nothing was moving. He didn’t twitch a finger. And he didn’t take his eyes off Grace in her box or blink, not even once.

They put the lid on the box, everyone stood and Rose brushed her father’s leg with her hand. More by accident than anything else. He looked down and the heavy curtains over his eyes lifted a little.

“Orright?” he growled.

“Yea.”

There were circles under his eyes the colour of birds’ eggs. He looked at Rose a little moment longer, before his eyes went back to the box.

They put Grace in a hole in the ground, like they’d done with one of Helen’s little sisters when she finally stopped coughing. It was so deep. Nothing that got put in there was coming back up, not a chance. Or so Rose hoped.

#

After the last guest had left the wake, Rose’s father put on his cap and went off into the darkness on the big black bastard, the one Grace had liked best. Rose watched from her window, all the through the night, until he came thundering back through the gates in the morning.

When he came in, his footsteps had changed. He was no longer drifting, sliding all over the place like he was on tracks; he was making sure his feet hit the ground now. He was in Charlie’s room, his voice a low growl, somewhere between a cough and a song.

Rose came out of her room carefully, stood in between doors and listened. She couldn’t make out what her father was saying, it could have been the most important thing or complete gibberish and she wouldn’t have known the difference.

The growling stopped and, two loud steps later, her father was in the hallway with her.

“Orright?”

“Yea.”

“Good girl, Rosie.”

He walked off. Rose’s ears traced his path down the stairs, through the sitting room and into the office. The sound of the door closing behind him sounded like a coffin lid being nailed shut.

#

He went out again that night and the next night and the night after that. He wasn’t coming back. Rose was sure of it, every time he went out.

He’d fall asleep on the horse, come off and break his neck. Roll into the fire while he was sleeping and burn to death. Sit there, not sleeping, until his body just died to make him rest. He’d be eaten by bears. Bitten by vampires.

He never slept and Rose didn’t either; instead she walked from window to window, scanning the dark for the glow of distant fires.   


#

“Orright?”

“Yea.”

“Good girl.”

That was all he had left. After a night out in the dark with the Grace’s ghost, after his rumbling, growling visit to Charlie, this much was left for Rose. Three words. The same three words. Over and over and over. Three fucking words.

Better than nothing.

#

Rose was so tired, she wasn’t sure whether the horse and vardo coming in through the big gates was real or not. It rumbled quietly past the stupid sculpture and disappeared behind the stable. She pulled on her coat and slipped out into the cool, grey morning.

The vardo was very real indeed, and so were the big black horse – the one Grace had liked best - huffing hot breaths and the man smoking at the reins.

“_Sar’shan_, Johnny Dogs?”

“Rosie-girl.” He looked down and squinted at her. “Good to go?”

Rose hesitated for a moment. She was exhausted, she was getting a bit hungry and she was going to hell for cursing her father’s wife to death; but she was good to go, she supposed. She needed a holiday.

“Yea.”

“In you go then.” Johnny Dogs nodded towards the back of the wagon.

Rose climbed up and past him into the homely gloom of the inside. She settled down with her back against the chest of drawers and looked out at the first beginnings of drizzle. The round of the roof was like a frame, turning the outside into a sad picture.

“Here we go.”

Rose turned her head and saw her father marching towards them, a bag over his shoulder and Charlie on his hip.

Johnny Dogs took Charlie as Tommy passed him up and handed him through to Rose. He sat down heavily on her crossed legs and looked up at her open-mouthed, nearly drooling like some ejit; he’d no idea what was going on, the poor little bastard. Rose’s father climbed on and took the reins. He was about to click his tongue when his eyes snagged on Rose and he stopped.

For a moment he just looked at her, an unlit cigarette holding onto his lip as if by magic. Rose held his stare. She wasn’t getting out, he’d have to throw her off if he wanted her gone. Her father had a difficult face, Rose wasn’t sure if he was just annoyed or also something else, something a little better maybe.

Finally, he gave a hint of a shrug and a nod. He turned towards the horse, snapped the reins and the wagon croaked forward. The gate shook into view.

“You hold onto your brother, eh?” he said without looking at her.

There was a faint clinking sound of plates on plates inside the drawers behind her as they got going.

“Tommy!”

Rose shoved Charlie off her legs, got up on her knees and lifted the curtain over the back window a little. Her uncles and aunties were on the steps on the big house, waving and shouting. Her uncle John and Finn were coming after them on foot, skidding on the gravel in their fancy shoes.

Rose turned to look at her father, but his back was turned, he was staring straight at the road. Cigarette smoke was rising over the top of his head.

They were shouting their heads off, but he didn’t look back.

He wasn’t planning on coming back in a hurry, he’d even brought a bag. Perhaps he wasn’t planning on coming back at all; he’d brought Charlie after all. He was running away. Off on the road in a wagon drawn by his dead wife’s favourite horse…and he’d been about to leave Rose behind.

She’d gotten lucky, that was all.

If she hadn’t looked out the right window at the right time, he’d have left her on those steps with the rest of them. Shouting and waving after his turned back.

  


  



End file.
